


Follow

by thatsrightdollface



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Angels & Demons, Body Horror, Car Accidents, Carnival, Demon Deals, Gen, Humanstuck, I tagged this M cause of some body horror planned for chapter 3 tbh????, M/M, SO, Swearing, but not at first -- in chapter 3!!!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-14
Updated: 2020-05-25
Packaged: 2021-03-02 22:34:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 11,509
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24184444
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatsrightdollface/pseuds/thatsrightdollface
Summary: Karkat Vantas had been sitting at a red light, waiting with his eyes gone dull and a pounding headache when he first met Gamzee Makara.  Or, more specifically, when Gamzee rear-ended him.
Relationships: Caliborn & Kurloz Makara, Chahut Maenad & Gamzee Makara, Gamzee Makara & Karkat Vantas, Gamzee Makara & Kurloz Makara, Gamzee Makara/Karkat Vantas, Tagora Gorjek & Terezi Pyrope, Terezi Pyrope & Karkat Vantas, as of chapter 2: - Relationship, as of chapter 3:
Comments: 22
Kudos: 46





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hi there!!! I hope you enjoy this fic if you read it -- I'm sorry for anything and everything I might've messed up. 
> 
> I hope you're staying safe and having a good day!!!!




Karkat Vantas had been sitting at a red light, waiting with his eyes gone dull and a pounding, doesn’t-it-fucking-suck-that-he-was-just-on-his-way-to-work headache when he first met Gamzee Makara. Or, more specifically, when Gamzee rear-ended him. The light had been red for a long while, by that point. Karkat just had to make two more turns and drive, like, another minute or so, and he would’ve made it to work just fine. 

Fucking figures. 

The car crunched — sick and shivering, like a bad dream, like looking in the mirror and expecting to see something familiar but really, actually, finding someone else’s face — and Karkat bellowed a lot of colorful, nonsensically-nasty stuff down at his dashboard like a reflex. He wasn’t sure who he was screaming at, in that moment. The car that hit him, obviously, but kind of just everything, too. The fact that the light had been red, and he’d been waiting patiently. The fact that he skidded out into the intersection, bracing himself, panicking, but the only car zooming by at that second managed to swerve out of the way just in time, blaring down on the horn. The fact that he would have to stumble out of his car to assess the damage, shaking and sweaty and trying not to say _“This isn’t my fault!”_ over and over, and probably be late to work.

Karkat worked at a fast food joint — (Caliburgers: it was terrible, and the green skeleton puppet logo scared children.) He was already wearing his uniform: his name tag, his visor, his blocky black pants and polo, all that shit, plus these ridiculous red suspenders. He’d been working at Caliburgers for a while, and still they wouldn’t... ugh. And still they wouldn’t agree to promote him — wasn’t that depressing to put into words? 

When he was a kid, Karkat had insisted on being the leader when he and his friends played games organized into teams. But in real life... when it mattered, apparently... he cared too much what people thought of him to lead well, he’d learned. Or, you know, that’s what people said during his performance reviews. Karkat lost his temper too early — he put on a show trying to impress strangers — he lashed out, perceiving threats when everything was fine. _And so he stayed too still_. And so he went home and vented to his friend Terezi Pyrope across the hall in his apartment complex. Terezi was a lawyer, with snappy red heels and a custom-designed cane to help work her way through the world with an actual, unironic dragon head on top. She ordered pizza and got Karkat to eat with her listening to true crime podcasts, on nights when he came home wondering about the actual point of things; she said the “actual point of things” was obviously justice. To try and do the right thing.

Terezi said Karkat didn’t need to define himself based off performance reviews, or rude anonymous letters slipped into his locker, or what some weirdo said about him back in high school that had just stuck around rattling in his head. What mattered was to keep moving forward, and to stop complaining for a second now so she could hear about how they caught the Pirate Queen Killer.

Other people’s judgments never felt like “nothing,” to Karkat, and he sure as fuck wasn’t moving forward now. He kept thinking he was _doing the right thing_... he was waiting patiently at the red light, for example... but circumstances seemed to hurtle out of control anyway. Maybe Karkat was screaming because getting rear-ended out of the fucking blue while already stopped felt like an unkind metaphor for something else, something big enough to swallow him whole. Maybe Karkat was cussing everything out one last time because he thought he was going to die, and die wearing his stupid uniform suspenders, too. At least Terezi was a good public speaker: she’d give him a better eulogy than he probably deserved.

Karkat didn’t die, not that time, but for a jarring moment he knew he possibly could have. Potential timelines shuddered through his mind full of different outcomes — versions of that day when he spun out farther into the road and got crunched between passing cars, or when that one stranger didn’t manage to slip out of his way in time. Versions of life that ended in blood and curled, smoking metal, tire burns on the pavement, Karkat’s name tag singed with smoke. It felt too real, and he was breathing much too fast, wasn’t he?

When he glanced in the rear-view mirror behind him — trying to decide what had to happen next — Karkat noticed two things. First, the car behind him was weirdly old-fashioned and painted grape soda purple, darkly glittering in the flicker of its own hazard lights. Second, there was nobody in the driver’s seat. A guy with clown paint on and piercings carefully arranged on either side of his lips, threaded with glossy black thread to make it look like his mouth was sewn shut, waved solemnly and unsmiling from the passenger’s side. What the fuck? What the fuck. 

Had the driver — Karkat didn’t know — _run away_ , or something? Or had this asshole just slid over to the passenger’s side to mock him, playing innocent? Poking fun? Karkat felt sick. 

There was a gentle knock on Karkat’s side window, and he just about jumped out of his bones. The guy standing in the middle of the road — _because Karkat was still out in the intersection,_ mind you, except that the light had gone green now and most cars were just sort of weaving around them, for the time being — was almost definitely the stitched-lip-piercing jerk’s relative somehow. They had the same nose, the same dark curly hair, the same hoodie advertising something called the Subjugglator Carnival. Weird fucking name, right? This guy had clown paint on, too, and sleepy, earnest eyes. There was a little confetti caught in his hair, and the minute Karkat rolled his window down a bit he could smell greasy popcorn and cigarette smoke. There was something deadly and sweet waiting underneath all that, though. For the life of him, Karkat couldn’t place what that sticky-sweet smell could be. 

“Alright, brother — we got to get you out of the motherfucking road, okay?” the clown said. His voice was drawling and low, creaky, somehow, like the sort of voice meant for drunk-singing and weird confessions. A too-honest voice, but trying to be comforting. It might’ve been the way he’d painted his face up, but it looked sort of like there was a messy, crooked scar running down the length of his face, straight through the middle, starting up past his hairline and disappearing down into his shirt. Underneath the clown paint, Karkat thought the clown in the road looked worried about him. Like _that_ was going to make anything better. “My bad, back there. I wouldn’t get it all in my head to fight it. But we can’t stay here, right?”

“You fucking hit me,” Karkat told the clown in the road. “I was waiting for the light — I hadn’t moved for _actual minutes_ —”

The clown shifted awkwardly in what Karkat somehow knew were comically oversized shoes. Again: _what the hell?_ If he’d shifted just a little bit farther, a car heading by to Karkat’s left could’ve hit him. Karkat wanted to scream at this guy until his clown-paint mouth worked open and closed like a dying fish’s, unsure of anything to say — Karkat wanted to grab the front of his hoodie and pull him out of the way of oncoming cars. 

“I know I did, motherfucker: I don’t expect you to be all believing on it, but I’m sorry. If you pull over someplace, I’ll follow. Okay?”

“You’re just going to drive off,” Karkat said. “You’re trying to get rid of me —”

“Nah,” said the clown. “If I was gonna do that, shit would already be done.” He held Karkat’s eyes. “I’ll follow,” he repeated, and when a car passed by uncomfortably close, again, Karkat thought about how quickly this clown could fall apart. How easily his bones could snap, with a crunch softer and meatier than their cars had made, with his blood splattered over Karkat’s windows. 

Karkat didn’t know anything about Gamzee Makara, you see? Not yet. 

“Careful,” Karkat barked at the clown. And then he asked, “Is my bumper hanging off?”

“A little, now that you fucking mention it. But it’ll hold long enough.”

1½.

Karkat drove a ways forward, then — the light was yellow, by that point, and the clown headed through once it was just barely red to follow him — and pulled over into the next parking lot. His hands were slick on the steering wheel; he kept watching his rear-view mirror, waiting for the back of his car to tumble off into the road. He could see it happening. Again and again, he pictured different timelines, different ways this could’ve gone horribly: there was the clown, splintered apart on the side of the road next to him, stepping back just a little bit too far into traffic. There was his bumper, clattering onto the pavement and causing, you know, another accident. Ruining some other stranger’s day. 

It could’ve been real. In another universe, it all probably _was_ real. But this time, the clown kept close to Karkat just like he said he would, and they stopped side-by-side in the parking lot. 

“Law nowadays is to call the cops, after accidents like this,” the clown from the middle of the road was telling the clown with stitched lips. They both climbed out of the old-fashioned purple car, now; Karkat could only hear them because his window was still down. (And because he’d carefully trained himself over years of paranoia and self-consciousness to listen super well to everything in case somebody insulted him. Shhh. He wasn’t _proud_ of it.) “He’ll expect to exchange insurance, at least. Maybe phone numbers.”

“Can’t do that,” the clown with stitched lips said. “I have another way.” 

“Fuck that,” said the clown from the middle of the road. He mumbled something about how this had been his mistake, so it had to be his terms, now — he said it in the kind of voice that meant no funny business. But maybe Karkat hadn’t heard them properly, actually; maybe “I have another way” wasn’t _that_ ominous a thing to say, given the circumstances.

Uh.

Hm. Maybe it was worse, that the clowns had kept their promise and followed him over to this parking lot. What had Karkat done to deserve any of this? Maybe it would’ve been better if they’d just melted away into the flow of traffic, leaving him swearing out into the blur of the intersection alone.

“We should report the accident,” Karkat told the clowns, when they made their way to his window. He hadn’t reached over to get his own insurance yet, or dialed anybody on his phone, mind you – he was still having a _really hard_ lifting his hands off the steering wheel – but he wanted to sound like he knew what he was talking about, or like he wasn’t alone out there with all this weird talk of “terms” and “other ways.” “If you’re planning to threaten me now, I swear to God —”

Something strange happened to the clowns, when Karkat _swore to God_. Both of them had these dark, syrupy brown eyes, but for a second it looked like they had crooked-hourglass goat pupils, too. For a second Karkat wondered if that smell — like sickly, too-sweet rotten fruit, under the buttery popcorn, under the cigarettes — was stronger, now. Maybe that’s what it was: soggy floorboards and secrets, sticky fruit and death. But then it was mostly-gone, again, and that was ridiculous, wasn’t it? Karkat was just a little bit out of his element. A little bit shocked. Karkat was just showing _all the more reason_ why he hadn’t been able to prove himself as a leader, yet. 

“I’m not threatening you, brother,” the clown from the middle of the road said. Softly. “I wouldn’t even get to thinking on it. This was my motherfucking fault, like I’ve been saying.” He cleared his throat, watching Karkat’s hands. Half-waiting to see what he was going to do. “Got a deal: if you don’t call anybody, I can pay back the price of your whole car right this second. Can get you cash, too.”

“Father’s not gonna like that,” the clown with stitched lips said, smiling gently. Indulgently. Karkat thought he used the word “father” like someone might talk about a priest, rather than, you know, their actual dad. Don’t ask him why.

“Father doesn’t have to know unless you fucking tell him,” the clown from the middle of the road said. He leaned closer to Karkat’s window, glancing around like he was trying to guess the car’s worth. He noticed Karkat’s dirty clump of Sharpies in one of the cup holders and pointed to them. Held out his hand. “Write any amount of money on me, and it’s yours. I can wait here with you while my brother goes all to get one of those fucking money-tester pens, if you want. Show you it’s clean. No questions asked.”

Karkat thought about dirty money, then, and slimy schemes that could get him in trouble if he wasn’t careful, and the sticky-sugar smell of fruit going bad. He thought about some of the crueler, dangerous people his friend Terezi from across the hall had showed him grisly podcast analyses about. How they seemed just like anyone else, until it was revealed what they’d done, who they’d broken, what they took to feed their darker hungers. But in the end, he had so many bills to pay. In the end, rent wasn’t cheap, and he was afraid. What had the guy with stitched lips been planning for him? What was this “other way?”

In the end, there was something weirdly earnest in this clown’s eyes, asking Karkat “ _Please_ ,” promising this could be alright. And in a strange, still-out-of-a-dream moment, Karkat wrote a sum on Gamzee Makara’s hand. He thought of it like calling the clown’s bluff, really. He crossed his arms over his chest and waited for him to respond. 

Gamzee studied his hand, like he was doing some mental math. Then he fished around in the pocket of his hoodie, for a second, and pulled out a battered wallet. It looked like an antique; Karkat could have sworn it was empty, at first. And then the clown pulled out bills and bills and bills. He counted, mumbling to himself, and passed a wad of cash over to Karkat without even blinking. 

Something was wrong with this — or, you know, a lot of things were wrong with this. Something felt like winding, too-knowing, end-of-the-world circus music starting up in the back of Karkat’s mind. But there was so much he could _do_ , with money like this. Way more than fix up the back of his car, and pay off the rest of what he owed on it, and take care of groceries for the week. This was more than he’d asked for, wasn’t it?

The clown folded this money into Karkat’s hands and asked, “We’re good?”

And Karkat said, “I don’t even know if this is real.” 

“Of course,” the clown from the middle of the road agreed. True to his word, he waited with Karkat while his brother — while “Kurloz,” apparently — drove off to get some tester-pens. They called Karkat’s work to explain why he was running late together; Gamzee told Karkat his name, and about the confetti poppers that had exploded in the back of his car just before the accident, and... well. They talked, a little bit. Karkat ranted about how Gamzee’d been irresponsible and rude, and Gamzee nodded along. Karkat ranted about how ridiculously sketchy it was that he’d had _this much money_ on him, and Gamzee said, “Yeah, you’d be surprised what kinda miracles my carnival can work.”

That was pretty objectively a weird thing to say, wasn’t it? Gamzee was probably just saying his carnival made good money; he was probably just telling Karkat they performed some amazing tricks, and he wouldn’t be surprised they were rolling in cash once he saw their show. But Gamzee’s voice was bitter and reverent; Gamzee asked about Karkat’s job, and his hobbies, and whether he thought he’d been hurt at all. Whether they needed to get him to a doctor as soon as motherfucking possible. 

Karkat noticed that the clown didn’t say “the hospital.” He thought he knew they wouldn’t go by an actual hospital, no way, even if he _did_ say he needed to see somebody. This clown didn’t have any sort of ID, did he? His wallet had seemed so empty, at first.

Maybe he’d forgotten his identification stuff back at the carnival. Gamzee seemed like a scatterbrained-type, anyway. A stranger; bafflingly capricious, likely to rear-end basically parked cars and then try his best to make friends. 

After a while — and yes, this will sound ridiculous — Karkat felt himself relaxing, answering some of Gamzee’s questions. He caught himself snickering at dumb jokes, and counting the money himself, and worrying what other people in the parking lot were thinking about them there. He invited Gamzee into his car with him, and Gamzee climbed in. He asked what Gamzee did in this Subjugglator Carnival show, and Gamzee talked about unicycle tricks, and dangerous juggling, and an act where he channeled the voices of angels. He winked when he said it — it was for a show, after all. It was a performance. 

“That act takes a hell of a lot out of me, nowadays,” Gamzee said, chuckling grimly. “I used to be better at that shit, before I knew how much it mattered to get the show right.”

Karkat thought maybe he understood how that was: feeling better at something... feeling “better” as his own self... before he really started thinking about what it meant to fail. Karkat warmed up, bit by tiny bit, and by the end of things it certainly looked like all the money was all real. By the end of things, Karkat’s car was towed away, and the mechanic said she’d call him with an update soon. Gamzee and Kurloz dropped Karkat off at work, and it didn’t seem like he was fired or anything, either. Gamzee apologized for the weird day as Karkat was climbing out of the car, and he actually said, “You... stop saying that. I know.”

Karkat had probably misunderstood Kurloz, when he thought he’d heard something about that “other way” to take care of the situation and wondered what sort of horror movie, true crime podcast nonsense it could mean for him. Yeah, he’d probably been jumping to outlandish conclusions again, and this was exactly the side of his personality that kept letting him down when he tried to climb the ladder at Caliburgers. He wasn’t sure what to make of Gamzee, either, big fucking shock there... but he’d been easy to talk to, somehow. He’d had a slow, tender way about him; he wasn’t much like anyone in Karkat’s world.

When Karkat told Terezi about it — because of course he told Terezi about it, even considering the law about reporting accidents: she had an uncanny knack for sniffing out the truth anyway, and it wasn’t like he’d managed to keep any actual secrets from her in all the years they’d known each other — Terezi said, “You’re curious about him, aren’t you? You’re curious about where all that money came from and why he was willing to give it to you, obviously... but there’s something about him. I’m curious, too.”

“No,” Karkat said. “I just didn’t want him to get hit by a fucking car! That’s basic human decency: excuse me for not being the kind of creep who wants to wash chunks of splattered clown out of my hair.” 

Terezi waited for Karkat to stop describing vehicular manslaughter and the loads of laundry that would need to be done to get rid of blood-smeary grease paint, and then she said, “You know what this means, don’t you, Vantas?”

“No,” said Karkat, exhausted and rattled, flushed red, with way more money sitting on the table between them than he felt comfortable carrying into the bank with him. He honestly _did_ think he knew what Terezi was going to say next, actually. But if she said it, then it took some of the this-is-crazy, what-are-you-doing-Karkat weight off his shoulders. “What does it mean?”

“We’re looking up this ‘Subjugglator Carnival’s’ next performance,” Terezi said. She was smiling with so many sharp, carefully-whitened teeth. Her sunglasses were only a little fingerprint-smudgy in the glow of Karkat’s lamp. “And as soon as I shift things around with some clients, we’re going to see these ‘miracles.’”

There we go. Thank you, Terezi.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh oops, I almost forgot to leave notes!!!! :O Hello!!!! Welcome to chapter 2. I hope you enjoy it!!! Sorry for anything and everything I might've messed up. 
> 
> Thanks for reading!!!! I hope you're staying safe and having a great day.
> 
> (That's what I said last time, I've now realized... but it still holds true!)

2.

The Subjugglator Carnival website had been full of grainy pictures and outdated links when Karkat and Terezi checked it out, but admission was, apparently, free. Huh. It didn’t add up with the _actual fistfuls of money_ Gamzee Makara had pulled out of his pocket just recently, but hey — maybe they got you with snacks and private shows once you made it in the doors? Maybe they were a front for the mob, or deep into weird black-market shit... maybe there was a ridiculous parking fee, or these particular clowns were scarily good at guilt-tripping people into souvenirs. If Karkat walked out of there wearing a Subjugglator Carnival hoodie, Terezi was on strict orders to trip him with her cane. (She’d said she would do it, until Karkat described his rambly, nervous-babbling request as “strict orders.” Then, not so much.)

Some people said it traveled around the world, this carnival... not just the country, and not just for a couple lifetimes, either. It was sort of amazing both Karkat and Terezi had never heard of the thing, honestly — it seemed like just the kind of strangeness that should have been covered in one of those podcasts they listened to. She’d only been researching it for a couple days, by now, but Terezi and her old law school rival Tagora Gorjek had managed to find records stretching back and back and back. They weren’t exactly “hidden,” these records, but they were always sort of greasy, full of holes and quite possibly just a joke gotten way out of hand. 

Maybe the whole “Subjugglator Carnival” idea had been wandering the world for ages, wearing other names before it was ever given one in English — before some joker decided it’d be fun to squish the words “Subjugator” and “Juggler” together. (That’s where most people thought the “modern” name came from, according to conspiracy theory forum boards that may or may not have given Tagora’s laptop one of those annoying browser-redirect viruses.) Or maybe, you know... or maybe the whole thing was a bad joke, and all those “records” were faked by incredibly bored people, and the show had been thrown together in the nineties. It would explain some of the bad clip art on the official website, anyway.

Karkat and Terezi went to visit the place, in either case, just as soon as they could scrape together enough free time.

The gritty dirt parking lots sprawling around at the Subjugglator Carnival’s feet were packed full of cars that looked like a mishmash of every time period automobiles had been available; they got there early, but even so it was tricky finding someplace to park. They squeezed in between a herd of motorcycles and a crumbling RV, in the end. Tagora drove them, since Karkat’s car was still in the shop and Terezi had roped him into this whole “Research the Weird Nonsense I Found!” business. He was muttering a low, fuming mantra of “The things I do for you, the things I do for you,” the whole time he was circling around hunting for a spot. 

But Tagora was a better friend than he wanted people to think: he kept at it, just like he’d read through a lot of over-the-top accounts on those conspiracy boards when he could’ve made a lot more money doing actual work. The original deal had been that Tagora would drop them off, get the hell out of there, and turn up later when Terezi texted him that they were done and she’d gotten him the agreed-upon payment of funnel cake (with a fork and knife so he didn’t have to get his hands sticky.) But now... after reading so many accounts of the Subjugglator Carnival turning up in the Middle Ages, full of bards that could get stabbed through the heart and still keep singing, and juggler-princes that claimed to be able to enter their audiences’ minds, Tagora wanted to at least investigate the place. It was free, after all. 

It definitely didn’t have anything to do with Tagora’s lifelong interest in vampires, Terezi assured Karkat a little too loudly from the back seat. He absolutely hadn’t hoarded a secret collection of vampire movies under his bed back in their dorm room days. Tagora was far too slick and mature to get excited about circus performers who claimed to literally defy death, and he couldn’t possibly have multiple vampire romance audiobooks downloaded on his phone’s library app right that very second. (He did. Terezi said he played them during his lunch break at work — she’d walked in on him, too. Some of them were significantly better than others.)

The thick, complicated smell of the Subjugglator Carnival washed over Karkat the second he propped Tagora’s car door open. Buttery popcorn and oil from the rides, frying dough and booze, with some sort of heavy rotten-fruit _sweetness_ underneath everything. It had only really been Gamzee that smelled like cigarettes, then — but the rest of it lingered around him, bringing this show wherever he went. Maybe Gamzee couldn’t smell it anymore, or maybe it was a constant reminder of where he belonged, when he stumbled out into the “real world.” 

From the outside, the Subjugglator Carnival sort of looked like a world in itself: there were so many plastic-y tents, in purple-green stripes, in red-orange checkerboard, in eye-searing polka-dots. Some of the tents were tall enough Karkat had to lean back a little to see their jaunty theater mask flags, stuck up on top like candles on a birthday cake. There was a Ferris wheel where each box looked like a staring eye — a wheel of spinning eyes, like the face of an angel. Eyes and wings: all that. There was a roller-coaster that wound through splattery glow-in-the-dark-paint stars, like a serpent coiled around a tilt-a-whirl that was also an egg. Apparently. The roller-coaster was the same green as that skull mascot on Karkat’s Caliburgers name tag, he realized — the same green as the grinning logo on a nearby candy stand advertisement. That thing even had suspenders, when Karkat looked a little closer, except that these ones were bright lime. Small difference. It almost had the same swirls on its skeletal face, too, except that this logo’s cheeks were just merry red circles. Filled in, like gum balls.

Those two advertisements couldn’t possibly be connected, though, reasonably... the sign looked battered and much-used — carted around with the carnival for decades, possibly — but Caliburgers had only opened up a couple months before Karkat started working there. How rare could creepy green skull advertisements really be? They walked on, Tagora with his arms folded primly behind his back, Terezi with a bright red scrunchie tying her hair out of her face. They were given a cartoonish map of this whole garish new world, and their hands were stamped to prove they were legal to drink just so nobody had to fumble with IDs when they’d rather be designing goofy carnival-themed cocktails. 

(“It is nine in the morning,” Tagora said, and the clown behind the desk chuckled deep in her chest. She was a huge woman with an enormous amount of dark hair; she pointed out where all the best game prizes could be won, and when Terezi asked, “Do you know where Gamzee’s performing?” she grinned at her like maybe she knew more than her whole group had been letting on. Maybe she was in the know, somehow; maybe she’d already guessed the punchline of the joke.

“Gamzee’s kind of a free agent until his first show at three,” the woman behind the desk said. “You should be able to find him around somewhere. He helps with a lot of stands, when he isn’t high out of his mind.”

There was a line starting to form behind them, by that point — quite a demand for those hand-stamps, apparently — so whatever other questions he might’ve had Karkat just nodded back and said, “Oh. Okay.”)

“We can’t possibly wait around here until three,” Tagora said, but Terezi seemed confident they wouldn’t need that long to find Karkat’s weird money-giving clown. They would try out a ride or two, maybe; they’d win cheesy prizes, and see if the Subjugglator Carnival really did have over four hundred possible sno-cone flavor combinations. They’d get a better read on what was happening here: whether there was a mystery to solve, or if the conspiracy theory jokes were actually funny. Her confidence was infectious — always had been. And maybe Gamzee’d looked at Karkat like he was taking him seriously, too, you know? Like he was someone other people would actually _want_ to listen to, whatever his performance reviews said. Like Terezi had been right all this time.

Terezi knew Karkat well enough by now, she’d probably been able to read that quiet, frustrated _possibility_ in his voice. It was impossible to keep secrets from her, after all. She’d teased him when they found a log full of “antique” photos supposedly from the Subjugglator Carnival over the decades, and Karkat kept saying, “That guy looks just like Gamzee. Right in the middle of this one, with a fucking pie in his face,” and “That guy — Gamzee looked sort of like him. He even had the same dumb soft smile. He didn’t say anything about being a knife thrower... do you think he helped stage these to encourage the conspiracy rumors?”

Terezi had gone blind after an accident, long before Karkat met her. She let Karkat describe Gamzee-ish photos really a generous number of times before eventually just asking outright to hear more about the backgrounds... distinguishing landmarks, or interesting costume notes or honestly anything beyond one guy’s expressions. Announcing that she’d add _yet another_ tally to Karkat’s ‘All Clowns Look Like that Guy who Rear Ended Me’ count. 

Yeah, it had been funny and stupid that Karkat kept seeing Gamzee everywhere, his floppy curls, his melty dark eyes. Funny and stupid, until they found the death record of somebody who’d supposedly been split in half at the Subjugglator Carnival years ago and the conspiracy photos got dark. Gamzee had a scar running down the middle of his face, Karkat remembered — maybe, if it hadn’t just been a trick of the light, or a crease in his makeup. It sucked that Karkat could see a little of Gamzee in that report, too. The whole thing tasted sour and dirty in the back of his mouth, even if it _was_ a morbid joke of some kind. Like Karkat knew something he wasn’t supposed to, now: what it was like to imagine Gamzee cut into two ruined, oozing halves _and_ splattered on the side of the road, hit by a car. He’d never even seen him without the clown paint, but he kept imagining the guy dead.

It actually wasn’t difficult at all, spending hours and hours at the Subjugglator Carnival. It was almost like there was something in the air, dissolving Karkat’s self-conscious anxiety away into laughing ease. As the day wore on, all the games became better, all the swaying lopsided tent-colors brighter and more hilariously, riotously spinning — how had Karkat not noticed _colors_ like this before? — and all the acts they sat in for more and more like magic. Maybe those escape artist twins really _could_ rearrange their bones to slither through impossibly small keyholes like actual snakes wearing ballet shoes and matching half-masks; maybe the huge woman from the entryway really _could_ shift the House of Horrors around with just a few lines that sounded like poetry. Illusions and interactive sensory exhibits to suit whatever new visitor had come to play.

Acrobats that caught themselves in the air without strings, exploding temporarily into confetti and then appearing somewhere else in the tent, probably behind you... fire-breathers that could gather flames up in their hands, whispering to them in an exaggerated, clownish way before sending them scampering out into the audience so everybody had to shriek and raise their feet up off the sticky ground. Karkat’s mouth tasted thick with sugar and grease. He tried to imagine possibilities — other timelines? — where he didn’t enjoy this carnival, or where something went wrong... the Ferris wheel with too many eyes stalling out, maybe, or one of the clowns messing up a landing and accidentally tearing the tent down on top of everybody’s heads — but it still felt _right_. 

Terezi beat a whole troupe of clowns at poker and won a bag full of glitter and tokens; Tagora admitted that the vampire effects in the House of Horrors were “passable.” The escape-artist twins had made the walls seem to bleed, and claimed to be able to tangle the hallways up between their fingers like cats’ cradle string... the huge woman from the entryway had mixed Karkat a drink that made him feel like he wasn’t sure how to stop laughing. Another clown had tried to pour an extra shot of something in there, but she’d swatted his hand away. 

Gamzee had talked about miracles, hadn’t he? He’d said Karkat wouldn’t be able to believe the miracles his carnival could motherfucking work, and, well. He hadn’t been lying.

But that wasn’t a bad thing, yet.

2½. 

There were so many ways to die, around a carnival like this, just like on any old road. But for a few hours, Karkat could barely even sense them. Realizing it felt a little like losing part of himself: like he’d been walking for a long time in the mud and only just now realized he’d shuffled off his fucking shoes. It could’ve been unnerving; it could’ve been a release. 

Karkat told Tagora they should see Gamzee’s show and then, you know, _leave_. Tagora had funnel cake powder all over his long, carefully manicured hands, by then; he heard Karkat, obviously, but then murmured something vague and turned away, his needle-prick of a voice gone slurry. Karkat had never been much of a leader, anyway. How much money had they spent? How did Terezi seem to have a _second_ unironic dragon cane? She and the woman from the entryway — from the House of Horrors — had been discussing what they thought might have happened to the Pirate Queen Killer’s bones for what seemed like ages.

It all felt like it was happening so quickly, and also like they’d been hanging around the Subjugglator Carnival for days. They’d have to leave when it closed, at the very least. Something told Karkat it would be like stumbling out of the world under the hill in fairy tales. Like waking up from a dream, your whole body aching, unable to completely remember what happened. It would become a weird story and a hangover, by the next day. What exactly had they come here to investigate, again? 

The pile of money buried secret in Karkat’s apartment. Fucking obviously. The conspiracy theories; the faded black-and-white pictures. And of course, there was Gamzee Makara. There was that moment when he’d rear-ended Karkat at a red light only just a couple days before, and Karkat had been sure he was going to die.

They went to find Gamzee’s tent at three.

It was a small tent, all green and red swirls, like a weird-tasting hard candy. Like the spirals on that burger logo’s green skeleton cheeks. Compared to most of the other tents, this was almost nothing, but it was tucked deep in the heart of the carnival. Right at the center of everything. It was weird, though — unlike all the other tents they’d seen, there was a heavy padlocked door on this one. It was misshapen and scorched; the hidden darkness beyond smelled rotten fruit sweet, again, more strongly than anywhere else they’d visited that day. Karkat shuffled through the sequins and candy wrappers on the floor and took a seat.

“What do you think?” Karkat asked Terezi, but she was smiling vaguely, still. Lips hanging slightly open. 

“I don’t know,” Terezi said. “It smells _funny_ in here.”

The show was a double act, it seemed. Gamzee came out with Kurloz — yeah, the guy with the not-quite-stitched lips from the passenger’s side of his car — and they performed some silly little skits. They worked a handful of illusions, and juggled knives mixed in with heavy billiard balls and bicycle horns. There was lots of self-deprecating, slapstick comedy featured here... Gamzee mimed getting thwacked on the head by billiard balls, and tripped over his own feet, and let Kurloz make a big, silent show of bossing him around. He pantomimed desperation and loneliness; he tried to win the love of his own shadow; he picked himself up again and again and shrugged his shoulders all dramatically at the crowd like, “Aw, shit. What’re you gonna motherfucking do?”

After a while, the main show ended, and Gamzee stumbled off the stage, muttering, “‘Scuse me... sorry, brother...” on his way through the crowd and off to a dark inner room. Kurloz told everyone who didn’t have a premium ticket to get the fuck out if they knew what was good for them — part two was coming, just like it always did, and that shit was the real show. His whisper seemed so loud and eerily knowing, after a whole act performed in silence... aside, of course, from the bicycle-horn symphony segment... with only muffled voices drifting in from outside. Most people swayed to their feet and dragged themselves back out into the carnival. That felt right to do; Karkat knew he should leave, now, leave quickly, but... well... when he tried to follow after Tagora and Terezi, Kurloz met his eyes. Said, “Not you, motherfucker. Father says.”

Not you. Kurloz’s eyes were _wrong_ in the woozy, crackling-purple light, now — Karkat stayed frozen, like he had out in the middle of the road before Gamzee strolled through traffic to knock on his window. Even when he tried to stand, he couldn’t move. Tagora had been slumped against Terezi’s shoulder, leaving him behind. Did they even remember their curiosity? Vampires and conspiracies, rumors and shitty websites. All that was so far away. It felt like the dead of night — or like no time that should rightly exist at all, maybe — even though of course it was only three in the afternoon. Like, maybe four-ish, by now. 

Why couldn’t Karkat just fucking stand up?

What the hell, what the hell, what the hell. Could this have gone differently, if Karkat were a stronger person? If he were a leader, like he’d always struggled to be; if he were _more_ somehow; if he were better? 

Doesn’t matter. Father says. Kurloz must have told him about the car crash... whoever he was... and about what Gamzee did next. What Karkat might know. Had all that money just appeared out of nowhere, really? Could Gamzee have pulled whatever he wanted out of that wallet, no fucking questions asked, like he said?

No way.

Before coming to the Subjugglator Carnival — before the day Karkat had just had, before his head got so heavy, before he just _couldn’t fucking stand up_ — any of that would have sounded impossible. Obviously.

Clowns filed into the tent before Gamzee started up his second, truer act, filling every available seat; there were low, thundering voices all around, sounding reverent, like the beginnings of a raw hymn. Clowns stomped their huge shoes, and whistled, and offered up one phrase, over and over, so earnestly that it began to fill Karkat’s mind like shaken-up soda overflowing, splattering everywhere, just too much all at once. 

_The angels, the angels, the angels._

Kurloz led Gamzee back to the stage — he left him in the middle of everything, swaying on his huge clown feet, head tipped forward like a rag doll. Kurloz bowed to the audience, arms spread wide like everything was falling into place just perfectly. The carving down the middle of Gamzee’s face looked like it was bleeding through his grease paint. Karkat thought maybe Gamzee seemed about as helpless as he felt, not being able to stand up. Like there was nothing to be done; like the show had practically already happened. It should have been hard to read his expressions through the clown makeup, but just then... heh. Just then, like when he’d first met Gamzee out on the road, it wasn’t.

“The angels,” the crowd rumbled. 

Gamzee looked small, despite how tall he was, and when he raised his head he was slow and soft like Karkat remembered. He scanned the audience... one careful, exhausted sweep of his head... and he shuddered, when his eyes landed on Karkat. He recognized him, even without his Caliburgers uniform and its stupid suspenders. Gamzee’s head lolled, a little bit, again, and he fought to keep it focused. His eyes were too wide. His pupils were crooked hourglasses. Goat eyes. Time, gone wrong. His mouth hung open; the padlock on the door to the circus tent slammed shut.

“Wait —” Gamzee said. “No —”

But it was too late. The angels came, then. 


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi again!!! :D I hope you've been doing well, and enjoy chapter 3! I had fun with this one, hehehe -- I'm sorry for any and all mistakes I might've made. This.... took way longer to edit than I'd expected. Work's started back up for me again recently, and this week turned out to be super busy. @_@ 
> 
> Thanks for reading!!! I hope you're staying safe and having a great weekend.
> 
> The absolutely AMAZING artist Ceabu drew a picture for this story, along with some of my other fics!!! <3 <3 <3 I'm wondering if I shoulda linked it right away (what's the protocol, here, anyway???) but https://ceabu.tumblr.com/post/622664873516711936/u-ever-love-a-fic-writers-thatsrightdollface <\-- I'm sticking this in chapter 3 now in case of ~spoilers~!!! The picture for this story will make a lot of sense once you've read the chapter~

3.

Gamzee Makara channeled the angels — they were always waiting just inside his bones, you know, and he’d loosened ‘em up in the back room with sloppy gulps of wicked elixir, with cryptic wisdoms the likes of which Karkat Vantas shouldn’t have to fucking believe — and the circus tent melted into screaming light and serpents, all eyes and wings. They slithered through the cracks in Gamzee’s skull and bubbled up his throat like howling, like words. Talk about a fucking headache, am I right, sisters and brothers, friends and strangers? 

Haha. You know how it goes. 

Squelch. Crunch. 

Again. 

Gamzee knew he was trying to tell Karkat to run — _Gamzee knew he was_ — but of course it couldn’t fucking matter. The angels burned the world like judgment day yet to come. It was too bright: it might’ve scorched a motherfucker’s eyes to flaking charcoal confetti if they didn’t manage to flinch away fast enough. For a second, the tent was all glory, without a single fucking shadow. But that never lasted long. 

Had the angels burned out Karkat’s eyes, this time? Shit. Gamzee couldn’t tell. Everything was the whispering of angels, snake-scales that were starlight, supernovas too sharp for a human soul. Everything was the story he had to tell when he did his act, again and again. It had become all about bringing the carnival home to Father, by now. Didn’t used to be this way. 

Maybe Chahut Maenad reached over and hid Karkat’s eyes behind her huge palm — she had done that before, when new acts joined the show. She worked the entrance desk often enough, and she wrote her wandering verses of praise and horror, and maybe she had kept Karkat’s skin from shuffling off in the face of all this holy fire just the way she’d stamped his hand —

But maybe not. 

They were all here, Gamzee knew. Chahut and Marvus, Barzum and Baizli, Kurloz and Karako and all his closest family. They came for the show, and the story.

You wanna know how that story goes, sisters and brothers, friends and strangers, beloved and despised? If you sat patient for the show even once, you knew it like you knew the patterns in your own clown paint. Like you knew your own voice. You understood that you heard it wrong — not like _other people_ heard it when you spoke, outside the twisting of your own head — and maybe you didn’t smear your paint on perfect every fucking time, either. Gamzee and Kurloz each told the story differently, and neither of them remembered shit quite right. Time is like that. It’s relentless; it swallows the truth.

Gamzee was like an hourglass turned on its side, so none of the sand flowed one way or another anymore. Time could be like that, too, and Gamzee’s time had been funny for a long fucking while. No age, no change, no stopping. Maybe he remembered how it started. Maybe he’d misplaced some of the important parts, sure, like he’d forgotten what the Subjugglator Carnival had been called before they started listening to one angel over the other. But that’s getting ahead of ourselves, wouldn’t you fucking say? Gamzee was a bard. He kept singing, with a dagger in his heart. He told the story, even when it was coming out wrong.

Here goes. 

When Gamzee Makara first opened his mind to the motherfucking angels — first splintered his skull in two and invited a hungry divinity to curl up cozy inside — he and his brother Kurloz had been starving. Jugglers on the side of a dirt road in a country nobody drew on maps anymore. They had mud-caked feet and nothing left to lose: Gamzee had asked Kurloz if he should listen when the angels called for him, and Kurloz had said, “Yes, of fucking course, brother. Listen, and tell me what they say.”

Amen. 

The first angel gave Gamzee poetry — we’re talking about a Muse, you get it? A Muse that filled his stumbling head with stories from heaven and showed him places where the sky dissolved into golden light, into clouds rippling with impossible colors and prophesy and the warm chiming music of the suns. A calliope for a sunny afternoon. Something like that. And as he remembered that first angel, Gamzee gave this poetry — this heaven — to his audience again and again and again. It had to go that way. The blinding cosmic light dripped into gold spires all around them... with the angels whispering, always hissing their secrets. No more dirty floor, no more swaying spangly curtain, no more sticky stage light. They were an eternity above the world. They breathed dizziness and ozone. They remembered together, and their heads rattled with inspiration. Angels wove between the fucking towers, tangling like roller-coaster tracks. Gamzee tried to raise his head, to scan the audience for Karkat, again, but he was already starting to taste the next half of this show. The second angel was coming, like bile in his throat. Father never gave them long in heaven, anymore. 

A Muse’s gift. A Muse’s act. Long ago, Gamzee performed these visions for Kurloz, and for other artists who were patient enough to listen when he tripped over his voice. They gathered their first carnival together, motherfuckers, whatever it’s fucking name had been. Gamzee knew Marvus Xoloto would be murmuring new songs under his breath, right about now, shivering. Reaching for their Muse as long as he tasted heaven. Marvus would only remember pieces of his songs to work into acts later, but it would be enough to send crowds into a frenzy. Chahut would be scribbling frantic poetry up her arms, not wanting to lose any of her truest voice; Kurloz would stare forward quietly.

Waiting.

But what would Karkat do, here, now that the act had begun? Was that shouty, scolding motherfucker even still breathing? He had dreams of being a leader, Gamzee knew: he had dreams of feeling heard. Gamzee‘d hung on Karkat’s words only recently, but maybe he hadn’t fucking noticed it. Or maybe he had, seeing as he’d gotten his unknowing self all the way here. To the carnival, to the foot of heaven, to Gamzee’s side, again. Was the Muse feeding Karkat inspiration, too? What the fuck could _he_ see, in these prophesy-clouds? If this had been the whole act, maybe Gamzee would have invited Karkat here his own self. If this holy shit had been the whole act, well, hey. Maybe Gamzee would’ve written “Come find me :o)” on Karkat’s palm right back, after Karkat scribbled numbers on his. A payment, for his broken car. 

Heaven wouldn’t last long, though, of course — (said that already, huh? You got me)— and the Muse... that first angel... almost never had time to come see them, anymore. The Muse wasn’t the one who controlled time, after all, who could turn hourglasses on their sides or grind ‘em into a special stardust pulp. Gamzee reached for heaven first, every time he did this show, but the story had two sides to it. There’s a screaming theater mask just like there’s a smiling one. Don’t you fucking know it?

Amen, right? Amen, again and again. 

Gamzee channeled heaven, yeah, but he was trying to wrestle himself away, too. It wouldn’t work, but a motherfucker had to try. The second angel was already here. Gamzee tried to gather it all back inside himself just the same, but the second angel was _always already here_. And how could Gamzee get Karkat out before he was changed? Before he was dead-beyond-dead? Most living creatures didn’t make it past meeting the second angel, and all the ones that did, haha, uh, you know. Their time went fucking wrong. 

Father wasn’t supposed to know about Karkat. Gamzee had reached out to someone on the outside — Gamzee had wanted a loose end to live. Why had Kurloz told, then? Why was Kurloz smiling so beatifically, _so lovingly_ right the fuck now, as Gamzee was screaming at Karkat to run? Screaming for Kurloz to help him, to listen. Used to be, they were each other’s only family in the world. Used to be, it wasn’t so easy for Kurloz to kill things that mattered to his brother, even if he wouldn’t mind the fucking blood much, otherwise. 

Kurloz never minded the blood, not the way Gamzee did; Kurloz had been happy, when the gospels changed; Kurloz said there was one true angel, and that was the shrieking heart of their story. He told all that ancient revelation differently than Gamzee, you’ll remember. 

Kurloz was supposed to get all the regular crowd out: he had refused. Maybe he thought he was cleaning up another of Gamzee’s messes, like scrubbing puke off the floor. Like gluing his bones back together after an act. Only Karkat wasn’t one of Gamzee’s motherfucking messes, motherfucker. Karkat deserved better than getting rear-ended at a red light out of the fucking blue; he deserved better than Gamzee promising him he could handle this his own way, and everything could be fine. And then this. And then this, out of all those promises. 

Just wait. 

Just listen. 

Brothers and sisters, friends and strangers, beloved and despised: they called the second angel the Lord, at first, before Kurloz started calling him Father. Kurloz trusted their Father more than anything: Kurloz heard Gamzee yelling warnings for the stranger Karkat Vantas’s sake, but everyone knew he chose to do nothing at all. Was that a new verse in the song — a new stage in the story — fresh and fucking different after all this unchanging time? “Shh,” Kurloz told his brother. A finger raised against his almost-stitched-up lips. Shh, it’ll all be over soon.

Karkat was a funny, sharp-voiced jerk with so much to live for: Karkat didn’t run... _couldn’t run_... and there was fruit gathered and rotting at the foot of the Tree of Knowledge. Always had been. That’s the next part of the story, even if it’s changed, this time. The fruit. Let’s talk about the fruit. That second angel had shown them where it was, and the more Gamzee and Kurloz ate of that motherfucking fruit the more easily they could juggle the world in their hands. They could subjugate creation: Subjugglators, with miracles under their skin, you see? There was fruit gathered and rotting at the foot of the Tree of Knowledge, and their carnival made it into that wicked elixir. It had started up so long ago.

Of course Gamzee and Kurloz had eaten the fruit, at the beginning of things. They’d been starving, right? The wicked elixir was still too sweet on Gamzee’s lips when the Tree of Knowledge sprouted straight through his bones, this time. It did that, nowadays — he didn’t remember it being so fucking painful, when the world was young. It carved him in half starting from his gut; its trunk burst through his intestines, splattering him across the sticky circus tent floor. Because of course they were back in the circus tent. They hadn’t seen where the second angel came from, not yet, not really. It wasn’t the aching ashes of Eden, even if this tree’d grown there, once. Eden was where the Lord had done so much of his very best work, but... shitty twist... he didn’t belong there, just like he didn’t belong to heaven. Get it, motherfucker?

The lower branches of that fucking tree threaded through Gamzee’s ribs, reaching between them like hands clasped in prayer. Leaves rustled in his lungs, hanging with gloppy wet strings of him; he choked on too-sweet blood and his insides looked purple in the bruised light. Gamzee stared at the ground from two different sides of that tree, the halves of him fallen apart again. 

The best fruit hung at the top of the Tree of Knowledge, but of course if you ate fruit like _that_ you would become too much like God. The Subjugglator Carnival took fistfuls of the squirmy, rotten fruit at the foot of the tree and ate it, staining their lips like sticky purple blood. It was enough. Karkat Vantas was around to see it, this time, just like he was around to hear when the second angel started laughing. This laughter was a rattling plastic sound, filling the circus tent. Father always had so much to say. Sometimes he was a crooked serpent in the branches; sometimes he was a green skeletal stranger in suspenders, who promised the world was ending very soon. Gamzee and his carnival would live until the end of the world; they could die and die, but until hell fought heaven... until the Tree of Knowledge withered... they would work their sick-sweet miracles. They would set up the stage for what had to come next.

It was a calling. It was gospel. Wasn’t it? 

What had the name of this whole fucking carnival been, before they became this? What was Father saying to Karkat Vantas? Would he drag him forward and tell him exactly why he should eat the fruit... or was he ripping the guy into gloppy pieces right now, like he tore Gamzee in two? Karkat wouldn’t be able to stick himself back together, when the second angel was finished. Someone else would mop him up off the floor of the circus tent before Gamzee’s next show. 

Gamzee channeled the angels, and the Tree of Knowledge; Gamzee channeled the rotten fruit, and he channeled Father. But he raged for his family, too, with everything that remained of his voice: for Kurloz and for Marvus, for Chahut and the twins, for Karako and the others. He preached that Karkat wasn’t supposed to be there. He promised that Karkat could still get out of this, even though of course he didn’t know if it was true — it was another verse to a song that had been sung a hundred thousand times before. Who knew which parts were true, anymore? Goddamn. Time devoured everything.

Listen, brothers and sisters, beloved and terrifying, unholy and never dead. Maybe Karkat Vantas deserved to live! Maybe this was something new. Maybe —

Listen —

And then Gamzee was gone. Bleeding out, like he always did. Tasting the edge of death. Kurloz would stitch him back together, soon enough, he thought, and press some of the wicked elixir to his lips. Kurloz would tell Gamzee everything Father told him... or maybe not _quite_ everything. He’d make sure Gamzee was ready and awake in time for his next show, anyway, and like the fruit at the foot of the Tree of Knowledge that would have to be enough.

Amen, am I right?

No?

3½.

No.

When Gamzee Makara woke up, he was crumpled on a soggy pile of newspapers and lawyer magazines, plastic-tube lotion samples and dry cleaning receipts... but probably more important, he was in the back of a stranger’s car. The air smelled like his own motherfucking rotten fruit insides; it was nothing the cute ferret-shaped car freshener thingy hanging from the rear-view mirror could fix. It was dark outside — must’ve been the middle of the night, with only blurry, flickering headlights carving a path through the world. 

Gamzee was a smear of slippery pain, and he choked a little, trying to speak. Trying to creak his eyes open. The taste of wicked elixir was still heavy on his lips. His clown paint must’ve been all fucked up. Haha — nah, motherfucker. Gamzee could feel the whoosh of the car’s air conditioner drifting between the cracks of his skull, cool against the wrong side of his eyes. His clown paint was more than ruined: it was mixed in with blood and brains and rotten fruit. It had been seared away by the light of angels.

“It’s alright, brother. We got you,” drawled a familiar voice, not too far away. Chahut Maenad, you remember her? Maybe that faithful sister had kept Karkat’s eyes from boiling in his head; maybe she was adjusting the lawyer magazines carefully, to keep too much of Gamzee’s blood from dribbling across these squeaky leather seats. She had a gory needle and thick black thread in her hand, when Gamzee managed to catch a glimpse of her. He would only need the stitches to stay put for an hour or so — his body _wanted_ to fit back together every time he fell apart. That was juggling the world, right fucking there; that was the rotten fruit at the foot of the Tree of Knowledge. 

“What —?” Gamzee tried to ask. _What happened? Did Karkat make it out alive? Where the fuck are we?_

But, “Just a second,” Chahut said. Not, “Shh,” like Kurloz had offered, exactly. “Don’t talk too much until I sew around your face. You’ll move all the muscles wrong, and I’ll have to fix that shit again.”

Chahut looked too big for the back of this car — she was hunched way over, sitting on her long wild hair. She had smeary poetry scribbled up her arms, just like Gamzee‘d known she would. She stitched his two pieces back into one again, and the dark world blurred by outside the window. Chahut hummed, softly, and for a long time Gamzee focused on that topsy-turvy, calliope sound. He let it hold him right here, in this place. 

“Whose car?” Gamzee asked, after a while. When he was ready to think; when his face was settled back where it belonged. 

And “Tagora’s,” said Karkat Vantas.

Gamzee had been talking to Chahut, mind you — he didn’t expect Karkat to answer, but... shit. It looked like he was driving, didn’t it? Karkat had been bleeding in slashes across his chest — Gamzee knew, just like he knew so many things he shouldn’t rightly be able to see — but those skeleton claw-wounds were freshly healed. They smelled like death, only Karkat wasn’t fucking dead. He seemed furious and exhausted: in shock, but dragging himself up and at ‘em the best he could. Like he’d been going along his fucking way — trying to do everything right — and had gotten metaphorically rear-ended by the actual universe, this time. 

“Tagora’s this guy I know,” Karkat said. But then he corrected himself: “My friend.” He gestured at the passenger’s seat next to him, where somebody was curled around his own seatbelt, dead asleep. His phone was loose in his hand, and playing an audiobook about vampires for Karkat to listen through as he drove. Tagora was drunk, but he’d made it out alive, too. These were his fancy magazines and high-end makeup coupons, likely as not, and before it had gotten all stained his vest was probably pretty damn slick. 

“How the fuck...?” Gamzee asked. Chahut was still sewing his stomach back together, but he propped himself up a little against the car door. Trying to watch Karkat’s face. He couldn’t get a good look at his expression. Maybe it would be hard for Karkat to look at him, after knowing what he was. After seeing his insides, and watching Chahut glue his skull back together, mumbling “That oughta hold for a while,” down at her hands. Karkat was watching the road like he expected it to fall away beneath them all at any second. 

“You called for us, and we followed you. We’re your family,” Chahut said, smoothing a little bit of Gamzee’s bloody hair behind his ear so’s she could better snip some of that extra thread free. “You wanted us to get this ‘Karkat’ out alive, and we did. Mostly. I held him together while Marvus fed Father visions of him good and dead. Kurloz believes it too, for now. Maybe not for long.” 

“Marvus?” Gamzee echoed. Marvus Xoloto wrote his music still grabbing for heaven — Marvus wanted to believe in the reason behind things, and he’d ended up with some pretty explicit, adults-only shows once the sun went down. He had been practicing his illusions since the carnival was young, but even Marvus couldn’t trick an angel forever. Not without the Muse’s blessing, maybe. Not unless the act was changing, and Gamzee’s newest version of the story they’d told again and again had mattered.

Gamzee tried to imagine Marvus throwing himself between Karkat and the second angel’s slicing claws — between Karkat and the force of time gone wrong — and he gagged a little. Choked on his own throat and thick black thread. Chahut tore off a piece of newspaper to wipe at his chin. 

“Marvus is in your car, following us,” Karkat said. “My friend Terezi‘s giving him directions. This is more of a ‘conspiracy theory’ than either of us bargained for, but she’s always been good under pressure. Uh. We were going to take you...” Karkat swallowed, here, sorting through his words carefully. “We‘re taking you back to my place, for now. Okay?”

“Okay, brother.“ The idea of leaving — the idea of _not_ performing the act — was almost too much to believe. Another awful twist must’ve been coming, right? It couldn’t be so motherfucking simple, in the end, as just getting in a car. How often had Gamzee thought about starting over, across the sprawling impossible years? How many times had he wracked his stitched-together brain, hunting for where exactly he’d first gone wrong? 

Karkat glanced at Gamzee in the rear view mirror, and his eyes were bloodshot and snappish but so much softer than he’d expected, too. “I never wanted to picture you dead,” he offered. Like an explanation; like a confession, here on the dark empty road, out in the middle of fucking nowhere. “It keeps happening. I saw you dead in the clouds, too, when we were hallucinating or whatever the hell that was. But I also saw... I don’t know. I saw enough that I’ve decided to take you home, like a complete idiot.”

“If you’re sure.”

“Of course I’m not sure. How could I be sure about anything, right now?” Karkat’s voice was getting louder, getting faster. “But I know I don’t want you doing that act again — not until you’re certain you can get it right. I know someone has to keep an eye on you, and I know the fucking restaurant where I work might belong to —“ Karkat trailer off, laughing darkly. He didn’t think he had been hallucinating, really. Gamzee heard it in the shake of his voice. For some reason, Karkat seemed to feel it was his job to bark at Gamzee to be careful, dragging him out of the way of oncoming cars, even now. Maybe Karkat had seen something like that in the Muse’s prophesy-clouds, too: himself, leading Gamzee’s whole nameless carnival somewhere new. Into unheard gospels. Maybe he was good with playing that role in their act, or he wouldn’t be driving a car full of sticky undead clowns just now. 

“It can’t go on like this,” Chahut said. “This isn’t the way we used to be. We saw it, today, when you tried to rage and your brother wouldn’t listen.” Her voice was deep and rumbling, like rocks along a mountainside ready to fall; her voice was sad beyond sad. The carnival followed Kurloz and Gamzee, and they followed the angels. Always had. Always would, even if their paths were splitting in half for a while, in half like Gamzee’s face. Like their doctrine had always motherfucking gone.

It felt wrong, coming here without his brother, believe me — without the one who’d been by Gamzee’s side through everything — but Father meant the world to Kurloz, didn’t he? The act could go on and on and on, unchanged, so long as he called the fucking shots. That much had felt like a given for a long, long time. Maybe Kurloz would follow them, before the end of it: maybe they’d get the act right, like a billiard ball juggled in looping circles and finally winding up back in your hand. Could’ve been the story was far from over. Could’ve been. 

The answer felt like it should’ve been right on the tip of Gamzee’s tongue, but — no. Not yet. It was something to think he’d go a day without losing himself to the act, though, truth be told. It was something to say he’d spend a while almost safe in his own skin. 

Gamzee had lived too long, and eaten the rotten fruit at the foot of the Tree of Knowledge so often. Maybe the Muse would accept him again, and maybe he’d remember what the carnival used to be, sure, but even if not — even if never — Karkat reached into the back of the car and squeezed his bloody hand. He looked conflicted about it. His eyebrows were scrunched together, like he knew he was in way over his head. Karkat’s life was changing now; his idea of “justice” was changing, too. He was about to bring Gamzee home with him, after all, and this was only the second time they’d ever spoken. 

The people at that restaurant wearing the second angel’s face as their logo had spent so long reminding Karkat he was broken. That he couldn’t do this. Gamzee knew. But how much did it matter what Caliburgers thought, now that Karkat had seen what he’d seen? Now that he knew the angel that could shatter time, or tip your hourglass over on its side so a brother in faith kept so still. His managers, his coworkers... they couldn’t see what was right in front of their fucking faces. They were wearing symbols they couldn’t understand; they’d thrown away the very soul that was setting Gamzee free, just now. 

And Caliburgers had the motherfucking goddamn audacity to treat Karkat like he was nothing special. That’s one thing that never changed, since Gamzee’d been juggling for chipped coins on the edge of a muddy, nameless road. People never knew a good thing. Too often, people never knew. 

Karkat’s touch was worried and warm. He held Gamzee’s hand for a long minute, until Gamzee worked up the strength to squeeze his fingers back. 

They drove on, for now. Gamzee rolled down one of Tagora’s backseat windows, after a while, and asked Chahut for a cigarette. He smoked with his head flopped over out into the wind and his eyes closed. Smoke seeped through the holes in his throat, in his chest; Chahut folded her arms around herself, again, listening to Tagora’s vampire audiobook.

And then, “Hey!” Karkat barked, again, just like he had when Gamzee’d swayed maybe a little too far into traffic. “Get your head back in the fucking car, or I swear to God... do you _want_ to be decapitated?”

Gamzee chuckled, then, despite everything: despite crooked hourglass-eyes, and the way laughing ached in his broken bones, and the idea of hunting around for his head on the side of the road. 

“You got it,” Gamzee said. “I mean no, I don’t want any of that shit.” He pulled his head back inside the car, and Karkat hmph-ed down at the steering wheel, and... after a while... Gamzee fell into a dizzy sleep without dreams. 

Karkat was a pretty good driver, it turned out, when distracted clowns weren’t hurtling out of nowhere at him. He checked back in the rear view mirror every now and then, to make sure Gamzee was still breathing, and Marvus’s car was still keeping close behind. 


End file.
